Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Namespaces for the Functional Requirements (FR) family of bibliographic metadata models have been published in Resource Description Framework (RDF), the basis of the Semantic Web. The models include Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD), and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD). The namespaces can be accessed at http://iflastandards.info/ns/fr/.

The FR element set vocabularies include RDF classes and properties corresponding to FR entities, attributes, and relationships. Each class and property has a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for use in Semantic Web data triples.

A full de-referencing service is available for each URI. When used in an ordinary Web browser, the URI displays HTML pages with human-readable information about the element or concept. When used in a semantic browser, the URI retrieves machine-readable information in RDF/XML format. It is also possible to retrieve this format using an ordinary Web browser.